Review: Justice’s 2025 live show updates their past for the present moment

Under the bank of lights that hover narrowly above their heads on stage at London’s Alexandra Palace, Justice’s Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé look like a pair of eccentric scientists working late into the night on a madcap experiment. Tinkering away with their equipment, they create ornate formulas that result in seismic shifts. Their studious on-stage nature stands at odds with their dizzying blend of house and techno, with only their lab coats (two custom gold Celine jackets) giving away their status as entertainers. For two decades the product of Justice’s laboratory has united club and festival audiences, and now, in 2025, they find themselves bigger than ever: winning Grammys, working with global superstars, and becoming a key reference point for a new generation of hedonistic thrill-seekers. Underneath the lights is where the work of weaving their past with their present begins.

Watching Justice recontextualise themselves feels familiar to those who have followed the pair’s career. When they debuted, they were initially greeted with inevitable comparisons to their fellow French-club peers Daft Punk, but Augé and de Rosnay have persisted with an aura many of their blog-era peers have struggled to maintain. It's been a long time since their 2007 debut album, Cross, arrived and helped usher in an era of dance music with a rock-star swagger. Back then, they would maintain their presence on sites like The Hype Machine by remixing songs by bands including Franz Ferdinand and MGMT, blurring the lines between what could be stored on an USB stick and played in rock bars and electronic club spaces. “We Are Your Friends,” which is filtered throughout the London show and blossoms into view as the closing track, began its life this way as a remix for the indie band Simian.

The sound of that song — blown out bass and glittery synths creating a sense of bitcrushed hedonism — has now come full circle in 2025 with artists like Snow Strippers and The Hellp all tapping into a time when music was discovered online but enjoyed IRL. (If you still need convincing that new rave paved the way for Brat, then watch Charli XCX lose her mind as The Dare played Justice’s “Stress” at her Boiler Room event last year.) It would have been easy for Justice to ride the wave and package this tour as some kind of indie sleaze bacchanal, bringing peers like Soulwax and MSTRKRFT along to remind a crowd of people in their late 30s of a time when partying was just about affordable. Instead they returned in 2024 with Hyperdrama, an album of big-budget songs packed with tasteful collaborators including Parker, Miguel, and Thundercat. On stage in London, Justice’s live show proved they don’t need to rely on the crutch of cheap nostalgia — and that their forward looking approach has them sounding better than ever.

Augé and de Rosnay spend much of their time on stage at the London leg of their world tour nonchalantly plugging away at their bank of synths. Augé plays keyboards on some songs with a melancholy air, as if’s playing at a funeral and not in front of 10,000 people. The visual spectacle, instead, comes via lighting designer Vincent Lerisson’s impressive work illuminating the stage with the help of a gargantuan reflective screen at the back of the stage.

As has been custom since their earliest days, Justice cut and splice their songs together to create hybrid monsters spanning albums and eras. In London they open with “Genesis/Phantom,” two highlights of their 2007 debut, Cross. The opening of “Genesis” still sounds dramatic nearly two decades after its release, with a slowed-down orchestral sting setting the tone for the next 90 minutes of pummeling techno and gallic flair.

The suspense of the opener is replaced by a barrage of heavy-duty production as “Generator” crashes its way into view and Justice set about blasting their way through a set that leans heartily on last year’s Hyperdrama. The suite of adrenalized edits and reworks represents the live show’s punchiest moment: Justice have always carried themselves like a stadium-rock act down to their love of leather jackets and cigarettes, and “Generator” alongside “Love S.O.S” and “Alakazam!” is enough to rattle any speaker rig. But it’s an extended version of that album’s “Nevereneder,” featuring Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on vocals, that provides the linchpin of tonight’s set. In its recorded form, Parker’s tie-dye vocals pull the song into dizzy shapes akin to his own band’s arena-sized stoner rock. At the Justice show, however, “Neverender” is clad in armor and thrown into battle. Mixed with “Canon” from 2011’s Audio, Video, Disco. the song becomes rugged and muscular, something primed for war rather than a lazy day by the pool.

As the show goes on, the way Justice revisit their older material reveals the most about how their are updating their own legacy. When they play early hits such as “D.A.N.C.E.” and “TTHHEE PPAARRTTYY” (featuring Uffie’s classic “Let's get drunk and freaky fly” lyric) to revive that bygone spirit of hedonism, they choose to slow the former down to a waltz-like tempo. The decision to tease and manipulate one of their best-loved songs speaks volumes about Justice in 2025: a duo determined to do things their own way, never bowing to anything as gauche as a trend or revival.